The National: Intimacy and desperation collide at Civic Opera House

The National isn’t a particularly political band. But there was a moment Tuesday in the first of two shows at the Civic Opera House where the quintet just couldn’t help itself.

When informed of the surprising result of a closely watched U.S. Senate race in Alabama, singer Matt Berninger looked startled. You mean, he said, “America’s not lost?”

A song later the band ripped into “Turtleneck,” a tangle of guitars and rampaging drums in which Berninger snarled at another in a long line of blowhards: “This must be the genius we've been waiting years for.”

As anti-campaign slogans go, that’s a good one, and the fans finally had something to celebrate after a long stretch of brooding. Few bands blow up quiet songs quite as convincingly as the National, but the New York-via-Ohio quintet swings its bludgeon sparingly. On the contrary, this band makes a virtue of patience. It spent half of Tuesday’s set building a cocoon of darkness. Berninger’s lyrics dissected relationships where both partners feel distant from each other, yet are trying not to lose themselves as they drift.

The songs lived in a shadow world of guitars that smoldered like cigarettes and drums that rippled rather than punched. Bryan Devendorf’s drumming suggested a second voice, a counterpoint to Berninger’s sing-speak baritone. The songs sometimes slipped by like a half-remembered dream, even as they depicted wounded characters who can’t turn their minds off.

Berninger’s songwriting partner is his wife, Carin Besser, and they are expert at exploring the nuances of adult relationships and the challenges they face: How to not just love someone, but sustain it and overcome the hiccups and detours that would throw it off course?

“Why are you hiding from me?” Berninger sang on “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness.” “We’re in a different kind of thing now.”

Over two decades, the National has steadily expanded its audience, to the point where it can sell out theaters and headline festivals. But Berninger and his accomplices — Devendorf and his bass-playing brother Scott Devendorf, and multi-instrumentalist siblings Aaron and Bryce Dessner — indulge only sparingly in rock band dynamics. Their interplay just as often evokes chamber pop or a noir-movie soundtrack.

Little wonder that the quintet’s latest album, “Sleep Well Best,” is saturated in anxiety, but instead of projecting outward as might be expected of a band with a steadily growing international fan base, the arrangements favor a disturbing intimacy. In “Nobody Else Will Be there,” “Walk It Back” and “Guilty Party,” the songs melted into their interior spaces, quietly confident that they would pull listeners into their dimly lit world.

The quiet stuff also was something of a setup for the break-down-the-gates moments that arrived with greater frequency as the set charged to the finish. “Graceless” found Berninger screaming the final lines, and “Day I Die” prompted him to wade into the audience. There’s a reckoning just around the bend in these songs, and the narrator is bracing for impact, hoping he’s not lost.